Tag: compassion

Hungry Chair – a fourth poem for Refugee Week

David Herbert3 Comments

Hungry Chair is my fourth poem to mark Refugee Week – picking up the “chair” theme of inclusion from Nicola Davies’s poem I posted yesterday, The Day the War Came. A common response to the refugee crisis is “there isn’t any room” – sometimes there is an apology about it, but usually not. Once in a while someone will make room in their home, school or community. Hungry Chair, like The Day the War Came, is a poem which thanks and praises those who do make room.

Denel Kessler is the author of Hungry Chair. The principal she refers to is Maha Salim Al-Ashgar, Principal of Khawla Bint Tha’alba Elementary School for Girls, Jordan. The poem is a “thank you for showing the world what compassionate action looks like”. The Principal’s action challenges my lack of compassion. The video is well worth watching.

Hungry Chair

Let’s talk about heroes
the everyday kind
a Jordanian principal
at a school for girls
offering a simple solution
rather than slamming the door
in the faces of children
who have done nothing
to create the war
forcing the families to flee
or die in the hateful dust
clouding the world’s vision

the school is overcrowded
but when Syrian mothers beg
for their children to be taught
instead of saying     no room
the principal asks each girl
to bring a chair and she will
find room for one more
students walk to school
carrying multi-hued chairs
so many eager daughters
classrooms full beyond bursting
but the principal keeps her promise
none are turned away

a loving heart refusing
to be the lock on the gate
offering instead a key
a  mother’s simple wish
for her daughter to write her own name
becoming “maybe she will be a doctor”
a seven-year-old girl declaring
“I want to be smart”
the world begins anew
with open arms, willing minds
perched on the edge
of bright plastic chairs
asking only teach me

I am hungry to learn

I found The Hungry Chair here

What poem would you choose for Refugee Week?

An Old Woman – a poem by Arun Kolatkar

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An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.

She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.

You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.

She won’t let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.

You turn around and face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.

When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’

You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.

And as you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

With a plateglass clatter
around the shatterproof crone
who stands alone.

And you are reduced
to such much small change
in her hand.

Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004)

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Arun Kolatkar was a poet from Maharashtra in India. He was a prolific poet writing in both Marathi and English. He was also an award winning designer. He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his collection of poems, Jejuri, published in 1976.

This poem describes a fairly typical experience. The reader stands in the shoes of someone accosted in the street by a beggar desperate for money for something to eat. The reader knows what it’s like, to be stuck to “like a burr”. What we often forget, because we want to look past them as if they weren’t there, is that, for the desperate too, it’s part of their everyday, to latch on to others in the hope of charity. The tendency for the accosted is to shake off the attention. The norm for the beggar is to be shaken off.

But, in this poem, there is a notable turn towards compassion. The speaker looks “clear through the bullet holes she has for her eyes”. “You” look through and past her, but as you do so what you look at begins to shatter, and it’s only the “shatterproof crone who stands alone”. Is it then that the bullet hole eyes take on their significance? Is it at this point you recognise her wounds, the battles she may have fought and lost? Is it at this point that you realise what has become of her, and what has become of you in the hands of poverty – that “you are reduced to so much small change in her hand”?

There is such pathos in that last line. There is such small change in small change for a life that should be demanding huge change.

Holiday plans – some sermon notes for St Nicholas, Burton – Proper 11B/Ordinary 16B/Trinity 7

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July 19th 2015  – some notes for sermon for St Nicholas, Burton

Proper 11B/Ordinary 16B/Trinity 7.

There is only one reading: Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 (In my mind is the verse from Psalm 127, Unless the LORD builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the LORD guards the city, The watchman keeps awake in vain.) The other readings which could have been used are about God’s building (he doesn’t want David to build him a house, he wants to do the building for David – and all his house)

I thought we would plan some holiday this morning.

The run for the sun has begun – I think most schools finished on Friday. I distracted a boy when I was walking our dog the other morning. The boy was riding his bike to school. His trousers caught in the chain. I noticed he’d ripped them and asked if he would be in trouble. He said “no, it’s only another 3 days”.

Muslims have been holidaying this weekend. The sighting of the new moon heralded EID, marking the end of Ramadan.

It is time to be thinking of holidays.

First Choice and Thomas Cook could have lifted a verse from today’s gospel to sell us their holidays. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while”.

Do you ever catch yourself saying “I haven’t got time for this that or the other”? I suspect that as long as we are saying that we need to be hearing those words that Jesus spoke to his disciples – and what a week they’d had! EXPLAIN

We talk about “time poverty”, where we struggle to fit in all that we are committed to – work, family, interests – and with holidays we find time.

For the disciples, the rest time they are given is a gift of Jesus – it’s how God cares for his people, then (after all they had been doing) and now (with all our business).

“Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

Sabbath

For one rabbi (Heschel), the Bible is more concerned with time than with space (history more than geography. It’s the time of rest that is more important than the place of rest.

For this rabbi, the Sabbath is a spirit that is lonely and that comes looking for us.

Let it come, I say. It’s not so much that we long for rest, as rest longs for us.

Heschel writes

  • that unless we learn how to relish the taste of rest we will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.
  • that the world’s survival depends on the holiness of the 7th day. The task is how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit.
  • “Six days we wrestle with the world. ringing profit from the earth: on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.”
  • that the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals – time that is our own, for us to walk around in

….. days of rest that are holidays that can make holy days ….

Letting Go and Letting Come

I don’t know about you, but my best ideas happen when I’m not working. It’s when I’m in the shower, or out walking, or just waking, or suddenly hearing or seeing. It’s when I’m not trying – it’s when I’ve let all that busyness go. And isn’t that ironic? It’s when we let go of our work, when we put down our clever, when we are off guard – that suddenly we realise – and we use words like “the idea came to me” – we aren’t doing anything, and the idea just came to me. This is what I have to do. This is how I have to be. This is what life is all about – it’s just come to me.

We need to sleep on things.

We have to let go …… to let come

It’s at holiday that we let go, and that we let come those things which transform the way we look at life and the way we live our life.

And so we should pray for those on holiday, for those planning a holiday, that those things which come to them do transform their lives, and that when the holiday ends it’s not a case of busyness as usual.

And we should pray for those who aren’t able to holiday, who can’t see their way to having a holiday – because they don’t think they can afford one, either because they haven’t got the time, or because they haven’t got the money. What should we pray for them? That they do find rest, that they do know that God wants them to rest, that he wants them to have holy days to sanctify their other days.

There is a quote that I love to repeat:

The world longs for the generosity of a well rested people (Wayne Muller)

Things come to well rested people. If rest is the ministry of God to us, it is not much of a stretch to think that those things that come to well rested people are what Paul describes as the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self control (Gal 5:22f)

I dare say that they don’t come to those who don’t rest – because they haven’t let go to let come those gifts that so transform ourselves, relationships and society.

I also dare say that the contrasting works of the flesh (as listed by Paul – Gal 5) are seen as a result of an absence of rest. Check that out from your own experience and behaviour as I read through some from the list:  impurity, envy, drunkenness, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, factions.

I mentioned Ramadan earlier – I think it is worth us understanding more about Ramadan. Ramadan is a rest that Muslims plan for and look forward to – in spite of the rigorous disciplines that last for a month. Ramadan is a gift from God, a time of prayer, fasting and learning scripture. The intention is that they accept God’s gift, and that they learn and change as a result.

Our own gospel reading, inadvertently I think, gives us a clue about what rest does. It had been busy, and it goes on to be busy doesn’t it? They thought they’d escaped the crowds, but the crowds catch them up. But there is no compassion fatigue in Jesus. He doesn’t wince of flinch when he sees the great crowd. He has the generosity of a well rested man – who draws breath, who lets himself be wrapped in God’s sending love – of whom the evangelist is able to say “he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things.”

The world longs for the generosity of a well rested people.

How can we help ourselves to rest? How can we encourage each other to find the rest that we need, and that those around us need us to have? This is holiday planning.

In rest, we discover what God is building. It’s a rather different market place than the ones that have been constructed by ourselves – that are for those with money (look at London). In the gospel, the tables are turned – the sick are laid in the market place – the poor, the needy ……..

Blessing of Rest (this is how God cares for his people – “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”

Curl this blessing
beneath your head
for a pillow.
Wrap it about yourself
for a blanket.
Lay it across your eyes
and for this moment
cease thinking about
what comes next,
what you will do
when you rise.

Let this blessing
gather itself to you
like the stillness
that descends
between your heartbeats,
the silence that comes
so briefly
but with a constancy
on which
your life depends.

Settle yourself
into the quiet
this blessing brings,
the hand it lays
upon your brow
the whispered word
it breathes into
your ear
telling you
all shall be well
all shall be well
and you can rest
now.

Jan Richardson: The Painted Prayerbook

Russell Brand tastes revolution in the Watford Gap

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Russell Brand is always worth listening to. He is passionate and outraged. He is intelligent, and, he admits to being “fucked up and naive”. He gave voice to his outrage in an interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. Simon Kelner described the scene in the Independant. “On one side was a rather effete figure with an unruly beard who found it hard to take anything seriously, and on the other side was Russell Brand.”

Since then Russell Brand has been reflecting on developments since that interview. They are published in today’s Guardian. He is passionate about change and connects with the new movements such as Occupy. He writes of his commitment:

Well I am naïve and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don’t mind giving my life to this because I’m only alive because of the compassion and love of others. Men and women strong enough to defy this system and live according to higher laws.

He has seen the Apocalypse:

The less privileged among us are already living in the apocalypse, the thousands of street sleepers in our country, the refugees and the exploited underclass across our planet daily confront what we would regard as the end of the world. No money, no home, no friends, no support, no hand of friendship reaching out, just acculturated and inculcated condemnation.

and he has glimpsed the revolution at the Watford Gap:

One night late at the Watford Gap I got chatting to a couple of squaddies, one Para, one Marine, we talked a bit about family and politics, I invited them to a show. Then we were joined by three Muslim women, all hijabbed up. For a few perfect minutes in the strip lit inertia of this place, that was nowhere in particular but uniquely Britain, I felt how plausible and beautiful The Revolution could be. We just chatted.

Francis reports: a Maundy Thursday sermon

David Herbert3 Comments

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Today, Pope Francis has been celebrating Mass at Casal de Marmo, a juvenile detention center on the outskirts of Rome, and washing the feet of the prisoners there.

This is one of the many gestures that has captured the imagination of people around the world, along with his willingness to get out of his car to shake hands with people without the fear of getting shot, wanting to pay off his hotel bill, and choosing to live in a simpler apartment. I don’t know about you, but I find all of this very exciting. In recent years the Roman Catholic Church has had problems with its PR (rightly so, because of the ways in which it has covered up abuse scandals). But with the white smoke has come a whiff of excitement. Maybe, the church in its impoverished state, can become the church of the poor, for the poor. And, without doubt, what the world needs is, according to Pope Francis, a wounded church that goes out onto the streets, rather than a sick church that is withdrawn into its own world.

There has been far too much inspiration and charity from within the Roman Catholic Church for it to be hidden behind a smokescreen of scandal.

The juvenile detention centre has 48 prisoners. The majority of them are Muslims. Pope Francis will wash the feet of 12 of the prisoners.

I wonder how they will feel. I wonder what will go through their minds. I wonder what sensations will travel from their feet and from the ground of their being. Will they know, through this action, that God loves them? Will they know that they are dear to him? Will they know that they are forgiven for the wrong paths those feet have taken them?

I wonder what Pope Francis will feel through his hands, in his mind and at his heart. Will he feel the journey those feet have made? Those feet of young people. Will he feel inside their shoes, their trainers, their boots, their bootees to the life they have led? Will he understand their running away from their homes, rival gangs, the police? Will he feel the cramping of life in those shoes and why they have kicked off?

This is what Maundy Thursday is about, that we love one another. It is a new commandment which is fleshed out in Jesus example of foot washing, and which is reenacted across the world this evening, including prisons and a detention centre in Rome. This is a love which is prepared to lovingly tend the other, whatever the state of the other’s feet may be, wherever those feet have been. This is a love which feels for the other, and which forms the foundation for a community of vulnerability, compassion and love with the least, the last and the lost.

It is a transformative act. The two parties will never feel the same about each other again. He felt for me. He understood me. He held me dear. He loved me.

Another Francis has hit the news this week. The Francis Report is the independent inquiry into what has gone wrong with the NHS in the light of the Mid Staffs Hospital. The important thing highlighted is the question of how to restore compassion to the National Health Service, and how safe care can be given to every patient every time. The publication of the report had nurses ringing in to Radio 5’s phone in, frustrated that they are unable to provide the level of care that they should be providing. Their hearts were going out to those who have been neglected, but their hands were tied up in so much other work.

I looked for a response to the Francis Report on Twitter from nurses. Mara Carlyle, now singer, but was a NHS nursing assistant for 7/8 years, mostly on wards so understaffed, tweeted:

If you give nurses enough resources and time to do their jobs properly, guess what? They will and they do. Because there weren’t enough staff for everyone’s basic needs to be attended to which inevitably led to some poor standards of care, that we often had to choose between attending to patients who were (variously) crying, dying, hungry, thristy, dirty, fallen out of bed …

Alison Leary, a registered nurse and macmillan lecturer in oncology writes of the work of a nurse (work described by Florence Nightingale as “women’s work which should be done quietly and in private”) and she asks:

How would you feel about dealing with a stranger in such an intimate way? A stranger who is so humiliated at his or her inability to control their own bodily functions that they weep? Then imagine having to care for him or her and 29 other patients with only two colleagues to help you.

So we have the juxtaposition of the Francis Report and its admissions about compassion, and Pope Francis and his expression of compassion, feeling for the other, loving the other.

Nurses want to alleviate suffering – physical, psychological, social and spiritual.

The dilemma for nurses is how they can show compassion in a system which expects so much from them.

If that is the dilemma of the nursing profession, it is perhaps the dilemma of our society. Don’t we want to be the answer to the problem of suffering, however that is experienced?

But how?

How does the NHS recover its capacity for compassion? How do we become compassionate? How do we feel for one another? How do we love one another?

The answer is repeated in story after story – from the story of the care of the Good Samaritan, to the story of the nurse most likely referred to as an angel. All of them are touching stories.

The answer is hinted at in tonight’s liturgy, and in Jesus own example of footwashing and his encouragement (“should”- is that command or encouragement?) for us to do just the same. This is the practice of loving one another, just as Jesus loves us.

It is taking one step at a time, one gesture at a time.

If the time has come for you to be asking where compassion has gone from our dealings with one another, if society has become so complicated that you don’t know where to start, I can tell you the place to start is HERE. It always has been. The first step is in the here and now, in truly local initiatives like Jesus washing the feet of his dearest friends, like Francis washing the feet of the prisoners in a Rome detention centre, like the nurse holding the hand of a patient who is afraid – who through that touch reaches beyond the physical condition of the patient to her heart of hearts.

Kevin Bennett wrote Psalm 35

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On August 17th last year a man was kicked to death in by three teenagers on a dare. The man was Kevin Bennett, 53 year old who slept rough at the back of Iceland in Walton, Liverpool. He suffered a fractured eye socket, collapsed lung and a broken ribcage. His attackers were convicted of his murder yesterday.

This blurry photo seems to be the best of him.

According to Tommy Allman and others abuse of rough sleepers is common. As former rough sleeper Allman described what happened to him and others he knows through his work with the Basement, a Liverpool homelessness charity. He describes how rough sleepers get stamped on, crushed, urinated on and even set fire to. To add to that list, we now have someone who has been kicked to death as dare. In a TV interview Allman highlighted the importance of education and increasing awareness of the back stories causing people to become homeless. Homelessness does not happen in isolation and can be caused by financial difficulties, health issues, relationship breakdown or addictions.

Shelter Scotland has found that one in four of is just one paycheck away from homelessness, and that 5300 children were homeless last Christmas. Not all homeless people are rough sleepers, but rough sleepers is the public face of homelessness, and that public face is often not seen in human and humane terms. For many, they are just “bums” to be kicked, sometimes to death.

This was the story that held my attention as I read the ancient wisdom we call Psalm 35. The Psalm could have been written by murdered Kevin Bennett. Or it could have been written by one of the many people whose “back story” and heart of love is ignored and trampled on. The psalmist prays: “Contend, O Lord, with those who contend with me; fight against those that fight against me”. It could be Kevin Bennett praying “let those who seek after my life be shamed and disgraced; let those who plot my ruin fall back and be put to confusion … They reward me evil for good.

Friend Rob yesterday observed “we don’t know what people think”, and it is likely that there weren’t many people who bothered what Kevin thought. Certainly the psalmist’s abusers had no idea what the psalmist thought. They couldn’t see a heart that loved them. The hands they trod on weren’t apparently praying hands. Little did they realise that “when they were sick he put on sackcloth, fasted for them and prayed”. The psalmist writes out his agony when his prayer for them seem to be unanswered:

When my prayer returned empty to my bosom,
it was as though I grieved for my friend or brother;
I behaved as one who mourns for his mother,
bowed down and brought very low.”

In spite of that, the mocking continued. “When I stumbled, they gathered in delight; they gathered together against me; as if they were strangers I did not know, they tore at me without ceasing.”

They carried on kicking him in.
As a dare
to look big
they blindly crushed scum,
unable to see the man.
Forgive them, they don’t know what they do.

As for me,
I would not have seen.
It would have been a vague impression,
from the very edge of averted, defensive gaze,
of a blur with no depth of feeling.

I did not know him.

>Humorous non-sense

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> Funny business dealing with people with no apparent sense of humour. I am sure that 100% of people admit to having a sense of humour – and I defend those who are said to have none. Everyone has a funny bone. We just need to get close enough to tickle them – and there’s the problem. How to break through the barriers. Is it a problem of taking our? Is it about letting ourselves go? Is it a case of use it or lose it?

Thank God for comedy. If humour is about being ticklably close to people it becomes understandable how comedy and compassion so often come together. Look at Comic Relief.

Sr Maria Burke talks about the spirituality of humour and refers to the film Amadeus and the tragic Saleri.

Humour takes us outside ourselves; comedy is truth telling; laughter is a form of self detachment. For example, the wonderful film Amadeus can be viewed as the story of the vocation of Antonio Selieri, court composer to Joseph II of Austria. Selieri could not understand how God could gift Mozart with such talent when he did nothing to merit it and very little to nurture it. Seleri ends by attempting suicide and is placed in a mental institution. In the final scene he confesses his jealousy of Mozart and his anger at God; then he is rolled through the halls of the institute which are lined with other inmates in tragic states of mental breakdown. Selieri draws himself up as if he were the Pope being borne on the sedea gestitore, and blesses the people he passes, saying, “Mediocrities of the world, I absolve you.”